The T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard has not been disguising its plight.
“With Harvard’s federal funding frozen, we are relying on philanthropy to power our research and support our educational programs,” the school’s donation website says. “Your ongoing engagement is vital to keeping our mission on track.”
The Trump administration’s decision to block billions of dollars in research money to certain colleges is forcing administrators and their fund-raising teams to scrounge for cash. As schools across the country contemplate layoffs, lab shutdowns and other drastic steps, they are weighing how much the gaps can be plugged by private philanthropy — and how pointedly political their pleas for donations ought to be.
A handful are wagering that the financial rewards of trying to leverage donors’ concerns about the federal cuts will outweigh the risk of antagonizing the White House.
In an April 30 note to alumni, Christina H. Paxson, the president of Brown University, said about three dozen of its grants and contracts had already been canceled, and that the government had stopped funding many research grants. She said news reports stated that the Trump administration had threatened an additional $510 million in grants and contracts to the university.
The moves, she wrote, represented “a significant threat to Brown’s financial sustainability.”
She urged alumni to lobby lawmakers about the issue, and included links for making donations to the university, including to support research whose federal funding was canceled or delayed. (Brown said data was not yet available for release about whether giving had increased as a result.)
Many other institutions have opted for more caution.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and a former leader of Occidental College, suggested that some schools may be worried about turning off right-leaning donors who may agree with President Trump’s opinion that academia has tilted too far to the left.
Some schools would like to emphasize the political attacks in their fund-raising appeals, Mr. Mitchell said, “but their donor base is at least purple, if not red, and it’s tough for them to make a really anti-Trump statement and keep their donor base.”
A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said colleges and universities should address their financial problems by tightening their belts. “If these higher education institutions were serious about lowering costs,” he said in an emailed statement, “they would cut the bloated salaries of their faculty and stop wasting money on useless programs that do little to advance education.”
Universities have been grappling for months with sudden losses of research funding that cumulatively threaten thousands of jobs and an array of carefully planned projects. Relationships with donors can be fickle and fleeting, and many of the wealthiest donors have complex financial pictures with overlapping interests. And while universities collectively pull in billions of dollars in gifts each year, some of their causes are easier sells than others.
Student financial aid, for instance, is a reliable attraction for donors. Scientific research, on the other hand, is a notoriously tricky target in fund-raising efforts, even though some of the biggest gifts are tied to the sciences.
Even if appeals to bolster threatened research could raise millions of dollars, it might not be enough to replace the hundreds of millions or even billions that colleges and universities stand to lose in the federal cuts. Harvard, for example, said that in its 2024 fiscal year, it received about $528 million in current-use gifts. In that same period, the university received about $687 million from the federal government for research.
Harvard received a surge in donations this spring after its president wrote a scathing letter to the Trump administration, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Crimson. The university did not provide data on donations for this article.
Even so, private fund-raising by colleges and universities seems unlikely to be enough to fill the void. “I think we can be sure that the amount of money would not come close to replacing what has been suspended,” said Lee C. Bollinger, who has served as president of Columbia University and the University of Michigan. “You’re not going to make that up with donations.”
One task for college leaders is to discern how much they should emphasize politics in their appeals, whether in public solicitations for money or private meetings with their biggest givers.
Referring to the Trump administration’s funding cuts, Mr. Bollinger said, “I think universities, broadly speaking, have been very clear at saying this is an overreach and an assault and intrudes into areas of academic decision-making and is part of a broader effort to break down the norms.”
Still, he added: “I don’t need to go in and talk to a donor and make the case that we’re up against authoritarianism and we really need your help. I think it can be much more delicately handled than that.”
One looming question for higher education is whether this burst of government hostility, however long it lasts, will force a wholesale rethinking of how to fund universities. Mr. Bollinger has found himself wondering whether institutions should routinely designate a portion of the contributions they take in as “a fund to support freedom of the university when it’s under assault.”
Such a strategy, he conceded, would have limits.
“Over time, you could build up a substantial reserve — a rainy-day fund, but for these kinds of assaults,” he said. “But it would only get you through a period of time.”
Trump administration officials, among others, have urged universities with multibillion-dollar endowments to tap them to replace lost federal money.
But there are often restrictions on how a university may use its endowment money. In many instances, donors have attached conditions to their contributions, specifying that the money go toward a specific discipline or department. And now, a Republican-backed bill moving through Congress may increase the taxes that universities pay on their endowments.
Alison R. Byerly, president of Carleton College, worries about what the increased endowment tax would mean for her school. Income from the endowment is used primarily to provide financial aid to the college’s 2,000 students, she said.
“It seems very contradictory for the government to both complain about the high cost of college and then remove one of the main tools we use to lower the cost of college,” Dr. Byerly said in an interview.
So Carleton, a liberal arts college in Minnesota, made a fund-raising appeal over email that included a general reference to the challenging moment for higher education. “Colleges and universities are seeing federal higher ed policies and regulations change at an alarming pace,” a trustee recently wrote to a group of donors, concluding with a link to a donation page.
The school has seen donations to its alumni gift fund rise more than 10 percent from the same time last year, Dr. Byerly said.
She added that it can be a challenge to convey urgency while also projecting stability and confidence.
“Everybody is trying to find the right balance,” she said.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
Vimal Patel writes about higher education with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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